By way of example only, the term “products with reduced longitudinal dimensions” is used to mean pieces of filter material, such as cylinders of activated carbon, cellulose acetate, paper and the like and even pieces of tubes of plastic or plasticized material and including also small spherical products, such as beads which may, for example, constitute additives for flavouring cigarette tobacco or the filters themselves.
These products with reduced longitudinal dimensions are referred to by experts in the trade as “non-cuttables”, that is, products which cannot be cut in the machine.
The above listed basic products are fed to cigarette manufacturing or making machines and, more specifically, to machines for making composite filters, that is, filters obtained by juxtaposing two or more pieces or plugs of filter having different filtering properties and which, when finished, have longitudinal dimensions which are relatively much longer than the individual basic products themselves.
In state-of-the-art tobacco industry machines, which work at very high speeds, these basic products are obtained from elongate elements or rods which are cut during the process cycle in the machines themselves until reaching the reduced longitudinal dimensions the basic products are required to have.
In order to clarify the dimensions involved, it should be considered, purely as an example, without limiting the invention, that these basic products have transversal dimensions ranging from 5 to 8 mm and longitudinal dimensions from 6 to 9 mm, whilst the longitudinal dimensions of the elongate elements or rods are 6 to 15 times those of the basic products.
The relatively large longitudinal dimensions of the rods allow easy handling in a particularly precise and stable manner and also at speeds which are not excessively high.
Since the products with reduced longitudinal dimensions need to be supplied to the manufacturing machines after they have been cut to their final reduced longitudinal dimensions, they give rise to major problems of handling and stability during feeding to the manufacturing machines, and these are added to the need to attain feed speeds which are impossible for hitherto known devices.